This article contributes to debate about the political meanings of John Carpenter's 1976 film Assault on Precinct 13. Existing scholarship has considered how meaning is constructed in Assault via its relationship to the horror genre and from this analysis divergent interpretations have arisen that conceptualise Carpenter's politics as either "unconsciously reactionary" or liberal. This article utilises an intertextual approach to reconsider how meaning in Assault can be constructed through and with the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach. An intertextual analysis helps us to arrive at a new interpretation of political meaning that centres the viewer as the maker of this meaning and, because of this, explores how space can be made to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable political interpretations and allow films to hold ambiguity, contradiction and ambivalence in their political meanings.
In Georges M & eacute;li & egrave;s's masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon, one of the first spectacles that the astronomer-adventurers encounter is the image of Earth rising above the horizon. The scene in M & eacute;li & egrave;s's 1902 fantasy film is an uncanny foreshadow of two of the most famous photographs in human history, Earthrise and Blue Marble. The image of Earth from space evokes the critical question of what it means to consider human existence on a planetary scale, a question that began to take a newly urgent form in M & eacute;li & egrave;s's time and continues to haunt modern audiences. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak argues that planetarity constitutes "an experience of the impossible." M & eacute;li & egrave;s, with his unique penchant for staging impossible situations, is uniquely suited to exploring the radical alterity of "the planetary imagination."
This essay examines the short-length videos of the United States Customs and Border Protection agency that were produced between 2009 to 2022. It examines how the CBP exploits video to fashion an image of itself as a humane and "benevolent" force. Studied as an ensemble, the videos fall under three distinctive categories: the agency's canine training program; CBP officers and volunteerism; and the agency's self-described "humanitarianism." By omitting reference to the agency's human rights abuses of migrants and refugees, the moving images opt for a representation of laboring officers executing their duties for the protection of the U.S. A contribution to scholarship in nontheatrical and nontraditional media, and border and immigration media, this essay examines the scope of propaganda production specifically in the context of border policing.
